An oasis in the desert
Palm Springs liegt direkt an der San Andreas-verwerfungszone in der trockenen Hitze Südkaliforniens. TALITHA LINEHAN nimmt uns mit zu atemberaubenden Landschaften und in die einst legendäre Erholungsstätte der Hollywood-elite.
In the dry heat of southern California, the Coachella Valley offers breathtaking landscapes, vibrant cultural hot spots, amazing architecture and fascinating connections to Hollywood’s rich and famous.
In a red, open-top jeep, with the wind in my hair, I pass through the urban communities of Coachella Valley and drive out into a desert landscape that holds the secrets to its past. As I enter the private Metate Ranch, naturalist guide Bob Gross points out the length of the San Andreas Fault zone running through the property. The fault, which forms the tectonic boundary between the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate, extends about 750 miles (1,207 km) through California and is visible here as a strip of greenery along a rocky mountain. Bob explains how the movement of the plates over millions of years formed the San Jacinto Mountains — 10,834 feet (3.3 km high) — which, together with the San Rosa Mountains, frame the valley to the south and west. The same phenomenon that shaped the valley may now be threatening the people who live here; a massive earthquake on the San Andreas Fault is long overdue and could destroy communities up to 100 miles (160 km) away.
On our way to explore the geological cuts and canyons of the fault zone, we stop off at an oasis of green palms, where water bubbles up from the ground. Bob explains that the water comes from an aquifer beneath the valley. The Native American Cahuilla people, who lived on this land for thousands of years, got water from the aquifer and lived off the plants that grew here, including the California fan palm. Bob gives me the fruit of the fan palm to try: sweet black berries with brown seeds. They’re delicious! He tells me that the Cahuilla people ate the fruit raw or cooked, or made it into flour, and used the leaves of the plant to make sandals, baskets, and thatched roofs, and the stems to make cooking utensils. We later visit a replica Cahuilla Indian village on the ranch to learn more about their way of life.
Indio’s date scene
The Cahuilla people had their first contact with a European, the Spanish explorer Juan Bautista de Anza, in 1774. However, European families didn’t begin to live in the area until around the late 1800s, after a railroad had been built, connecting it to Los Angeles, more than 100 miles to the west. The valley’s first city, Indio, wasn’t established until 1930. Today, Indio is not only the oldest, but also the biggest of the nine cities in the 640-square-mile (1,657.6-km2 ) Coachella Valley — the others being: Cathedral City, Coachella, Desert Hot Springs, Indian Wells, La Quinta, Palm Desert, Palm Springs, and Rancho Mirage. It’s also the location of the world-famous Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, held at the Empire Polo Club over three weekends every April.
After saying goodbye to Bob, I head to Shields Date Garden in Indio, a historic date palm orchard and important part of the city’s agricultural past. In the early 1900s, the community here began to take advantage of the region’s hot, dry climate by growing cotton, onions, grapes, citrus fruits and dates imported from the Middle East. More than 100 years later, agriculture is still an important industry in the valley, and 95 percent of American dates are grown here. In 1924, date farmer Floyd Shields established Shields Date Garden with his wife, Bess. He not only grew his own hybrids of dates and invented both date sugar and date crystals, but also put together a slide show with soundtrack about the fruit, called “Romance and Sex Life of the Date” — an updated film version is still screened here at the small in-house theater. After wandering around the orchard, I enjoy a creamy date shake at the cafe and buy apple cinnamon-and-date sugar and apricotstuffed Medjools, healthier for me than refined sugar and just as delicious!
Art at the heart of the valley
One of the things that defines the Coachella Valley is its vibrant arts culture, and one of its most exciting projects has been Desert X, first held in early 2017 and again in 2019. In each of those years, artists created a series of installations across the valley, inspired by the themes of climate change, immigration, tourism, gambling, and Native American culture. The installations included a house in the desert covered inside and out with mirrors — art lovers from all over the country came here to see and photograph them. To experience the valley’s art scene, I travel first to the city that shares its name with the valley: Coachella. Known as the “City of Eternal Sunshine,” Coachella has a Mexican-american subculture that has given it three annual fiestas and many
authentic Mexican restaurants. I walk the colorful streets of the downtown area, admiring its beautiful murals, and stop to have my photo taken in front of one of them: What Lifts Your Wings — Coachella by Kelsey Montague on the wall outside Coachella City Hall. Standing between the mural’s two giant wings, I stretch out my arms and become part of the art.
My next stop is less than ten miles away, at La Quinta Museum, where I meet up with local artist John Cuevas. Originally from Los Angeles, Cuevas moved to the valley three years ago, having visited it regularly since he was a teenager. “It’s one of those places that never leaves you,” he tells me. “It’s magic out here. Anything is possible.” His new mural, Volta, on the walls of La Quinta Library, channels the energy of the city through images of art, literature, and nature. We work together on an artwork that he later gives to me, a block of wood spray-painted with the image of a shell and the name Coachella Valley. Most people might not associate the two things, but I had already found fragments of shells in the nearby desert — remnants from prehistoric times, when the valley was under water. The name Coachella is believed to be a misspelling of the word conchilla, which means “little shell” in Spanish. It’s the perfect memento of this valley of natural and artistic wonders.
A Hollywood playground
Coachella Valley is also known as Greater Palm Springs — and Palm Springs is probably the most famous of the valley’s nine cities because of its Hollywood past. Jean Paul Zapata, media relations manager with Greater Palm Springs Convention & Visitors Bureau until December 2019, told me that in the early days of Hollywood, actors working on a film always had to be within two hours of Los Angeles. “What was two hours away from Los Angeles back then? To the south, San Diego, which was already well developed and easy for paparazzi to get into. The next best option was Palm Springs, which was fantastic because it was underdeveloped at the time, so you needed a lot of money to get there, and a lot of money to stay there.”
Hollywood stars and celebrities have been coming to Palm Springs since the early days of the American motion picture industry, and over the years have included Clark Gable, Kirk Douglas, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley. They stayed in its hotels, ate in its restaurants, and played on its golf courses, and some of them built homes in an architectural style known as mid-century modern, which was popular here at the time.
Today, Palm Springs is a virtual museum of this “desert modern” style of architecture. Most homes built in this style had clean horizontal lines, open-space floor plans, a cantilevered roof, and large, tall windows that allowed nature to connect with the interior.
Many visitors to the city go on a midcentury modern architecture tour, such as the Midmod Design Tour by interior and architectural designer Lyle Boatman. I climb into Boatman’s SUV with a small group of other visitors and he takes us through Palm Springs, explaining how the explosion in population here after World War II resulted in this architectural phenomenon and how the city has worked to preserve many of its historic buildings in recent years. He stops at a number of the most famous, including the 1960 Alexander Estate, known as the House of Tomorrow, where Elvis and Priscilla Presley honeymooned in 1967.
“It’s magic out here. Anything is possible — it’s one of those places that never leaves you”
The futuristic house has three stories in four concentric circles, floor-to-ceiling windows, and a fireplace suspended from the ceiling.
We also stop at Twin Palms, known as the Frank Sinatra House, one of three that the iconic singer owned in the valley. Built in 1947, it was named after the two palm trees that still stand next to the swimming pool, which is shaped like a grand piano. To the delight of some of us, Boatman points out the holiday home of actor Leonardo Dicaprio, which you could rent at one time for $4,500 a night.
On top of the world
Part of the Colorado Desert in southern California, Coachella Valley has yearround sunshine and incredibly hot summers, with daily temperatures regularly rising to 115 ˚F (46 °C), and sometimes even higher. Because of this, many people avoid the area in the hotter months, resulting in a drop in the population from around 800,000 in January to 200,000 in July. But no matter when you visit the area, you can always escape the heat by traveling to higher ground. I leave downtown Palm Springs and travel six miles to Chino Canyon, in the northern part of the San Jacinto Mountains. Here, I get on the
Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, the world’s largest rotating tramcar and the only one of its kind in the western hemisphere. I stand on the edge of the car, often gazing out an open window, as we ascend more than two and a half miles along the cliffs of the canyon. In just ten minutes, we go from a desert landscape to a wooded wilderness that’s about 30 degrees cooler than the world below.
At 8,516 feet (2,595 m) above ground, I step out of the tram and into Mountain Station, a chalet-style building with two restaurants, a natural history museum, and large windows from which you can look out at the woodlands of Mount San Jacinto State Park. Established in 1927, the park has 14,000 acres of wilderness and is home to numerous wild animals, including mountain lions, bighorn sheep, and coyotes. I make my way along one of several hiking trails in the park, passing between pine trees and boulders, and pull my jacket tighter around me as the sun starts to set and the temperature drops another few degrees. Soon out of breath from being so high above the ground, I sit on a fallen pine tree on the edge of the cliff. Here, alone above the world, I take in the beauty of the valley and its nine rich and vibrant cities twinkling beneath the darkening sky.
“Here, alone above the world, I take in the nine cities, twinkling beneath the darkening sky”